Watch out, Android! Out of the gate, Verizon-supported iPhones are reportedly selling faster than buttered hotcakes.  "Verizon has seen such high demand for the device that it has taken several steps to make sure that customers are able to get one," reports InformationWeek. According to a leaked memo published by AppleInsider, Verizon has even asked its employees and their relatives to wait before buying an iPhone for themselves. Verizon Wireless Chief Operating Officer John Stratton wrote in an email to its retail managers: "Demand will be unprecedented." On Friday, CNet reported: "Verizon today said …

What can consumers expect from Honeycomb -- Google's forthcoming mobile platform designed specifically to dethrone Apple's iPad? For one, smarter widgets, reports GigaOm. "These information-at-a-glance apps are based on collections of data, which can be grouped and there are several new navigation methods supported," the tech blog writes. "Expect to see more information faster, without opening up an app, as a result." Improved notifications are also on the way. "Gone is the pull-down notification shade used by earlier Android versions." What's more, Honeycomb will boost the graphics capability of consumers' tablets (and potentially other mobile devices) with its …

AFCV Holdings has agreed to by publicaly traded Answers.com for $127 million. A Summit Partners portfolio company, AFCV is paying more than double Answers' initial pricing of $5 per share when it made its IPO back in 2004. The Israel-based Answers.com hosts a varied selection of Q&A forums on its site, as Vator News points out. Its WikiAnswers product lets users pose questions to the community, which anyone can answer, edit, while ReferenceAnswers is a forum where questions are answered by editors. Video Answers maintains a library of some 200,000 videos in more than 200 categories, allowing users …

Don't think of Microsoft as a social standout? Well, according to the software giant, its Windows Live Messenger is now responsible for driving over 2.8 billion minutes of Facebook. What's more, the volume of Facebook chat powered by Windows Live Messenger has almost doubled since Microsoft first shared usage statistics in November 2010, when the figure was at just 1.5 billion minutes. "The number of Messenger customers who have connected Messenger to Facebook has grown over 75% to nearly 18 million people," boasts Windows Live group program managers Piero Sierra. What's more, as Softpedia notes, Microsoft is expecting …

Condé Nast-owned social media service Reddit just broke the billion monthly page-view barrier. "That's up 300% from a year ago and a 20% increase from just last month," according to Mashable. To be exact, Reddit racked up 1,000,404,480 page-views last month. All those page-views, meanwhile, were generated from just 13.75 million absolute unique visitors, which accounted for a total of 68.11 million visits. "A big reason why Reddit can generate so many pageviews from so few people is that the average person checks out 14.7 pages per visit and stays on the site on average for 15 minutes and 40 …

Apparent for some time, News Corp.'s desire to unload MySpace is now palpable. "With a new structure in place, now is the right time to consider strategic options for this business," News Corp. COO Chase Carey told analysts on Wednesday. "The new MySpace has been very well received by the market and we have some very encouraging metrics. But the plan to allow MySpace to reach it's full potential may be best achieved under a new owner." Carey's comments came on News Corp.'s latest earnings report, which included a $275 million writedown for its digital media business -- "stemming largely …

What does the New York Times tech taste arbiter David Pogue make of Q&A site Quora? "There's an unbelievable richness of answers," he writes. "But if you're getting the impression that Quora is, so far, for geeks, you're right." Also, along with questions as to why Quora asks new users to recommend the service to friends, Pogue couldn't find any explanation of what Quora is or how it's different from Aardvark, Digg, Answerbag.com or Yahoo Answers. "There's a 'How do I get started using Quora?' question that you can click, but the answers are baffling from the beginning: …

TechCrunch is giving the world its first look at The New York Times' forthcoming iPad app News.me. Being developed in collaboration with betaworks, the app doesn't look anything like News Corp's iPad "newspaper" The Daily. "News.me is a social news reading app that presents the news that the people you follow on Twitter are reading, and filters it based on how many times those stories are shared and clicked on overall," writes TechCrunch reporter Erick Schonfeld, who said he's been testing an early version of the app. News.me apparently pulls in data from Twitter as well as bit.ly, …

Who says Google doesn't get social? Reviews from its new Hotpot place recommendation service will now be incorporated directly in search results. "So say you're looking for a restaurant in Barcelona," explains Google product manager Lior Ron. "If a friend has rated a particular restaurant, you might see their rating and what they had to say about it -- as well as their name and photo -- directly beneath that restaurant's listing." If users only want to see the recommendations from friends, they can select the Places filter from the left sidebar and then select "Just friends." According …

On the heels of, er, Clickstreamgate, Microsoft is accusing Google of foul play by only naively supporting its WebM video format in its Chrome browser, rather than the H.264 format preferred by Microsoft and Apple. "In response, Microsoft said it will build a Chrome plug in that will restore support for H.264, an older and more commonly used video format," reports AllThingsD's Mobilized blog. "Our point of view is totally clear," Internet Explorer head Dean Hachamovitch writes. "Our support for H.264 results from our views about a robust Web and video ecosystem that provides a rich level of …